Meet the bendable smartphone

The dawn of the paperless office may finally be close at hand, thanks to an invention set to be unveiled next week by a Canadian research team.

Described as a “flexible iPhone”, the PaperPhone is the brain spawn of Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It consists of a 9.5 cm diagonal thin film flexible E Ink display, is barely thinner than a sheet of paper and works by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.

“The paperless office is here,” Dr. Vertegaal said in a statement.

“Everything can be stored digitally and you can place these computers on top of each other just like a stack of paper, or throw them around the desk” says Dr. Vertegaal.

In addition to the other staff at the Human Media Lab, researchers from Arizona State University contributed to the PaperPhone’s development. The team is also working on a wristband computer called Snaplet.

Both the PaperPhone and the Snaplet are expected to be officially unveiled at the Association of Computing Machinery’s Computer-Human Interaction Conference being held on May 10 in Vancouver.